Scott

“Well, bless my soul, what stupid creatures one has to mix with in this world!”
― Knut Hamsun, Hunger

“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

“What a dim-witted slug the average human being is.”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi